Likelihood to Recommend If you want to teach your team or students how to program and learn programming languages, you would not want to utilize Phone Gap software. The Phone Gap software creates an easy fix to avoid learning every programming language for mobile devices. This creates a learning curve for some programmers because they no longer need to learn every language to be successful. However, for personal growth, this could pose an issue if programmers need to change jobs and are only capable of programming in web languages and then translate them using Phone Gap. Adobe Phone Gap works wonderfully for what our company uses it for. We use it because we have app launch deadlines and our programmers are invested in the company; therefore, they are aware that output is our goal, not actually learning the various languages, but more making sure the client is happy
Read full review If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and effort from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, Windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done.
Read full review Pros Business Application like payment collection, application for salesperson etc. Used for developing the mobile application that needs to be developed faster with the same User Experience on both iOS and Android. Read full review Xamarin allows you to write cross platform code. This allows companies to build apps more quickly by writing less code. Having code abstracted and reused across multiple platforms allows for more testing and less issues overall. The ability to use Visual Studio is a huge plus. Visual Studio is one of the best IDE's available and being able to write cross platforms apps while in a great IDE makes everything less painful. Xamarin is now free with a large company backing. This means that bugs on the platform get fixed more quickly and there is a large community of developers. Read full review Cons I would like to see the ability to write mobile applications using SWIFT and then use Phone Gap software or plug-ins to be able to transfer the iOS language into the Android language or to Java, CSS and HTML. We've experienced errors when transferring from one language to another. We worked on solving the issue and then had to simply adjust the native language and functionality for it to work. I have a team of graphic designers who would be able to like to assist in building of the apps but they are very limited, so perhaps adding functionality like a wix or weebly where there are options given that can drag and drop so marketing teams can support development. Read full review Forms - not 100% there. Still needs work but is production ready. iOS - sometimes errors can be hard to understand, if they even show up. Insights - Xamarin offers their own crash analytics software. However, it's not perfect and sometimes doesn't pick up crashes. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Xamarin has been great for developing different projects efficiently and effectively. It's nice to reuse the core business logic across different platforms so that there are less to maintain and little replications are needed. The biggest benefit is that C# programmers do not have to learn a different language to do mobile development.
Read full review Usability If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and efforts from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done
Read full review Support Rating I never had to contact support for any help. Most of the problems we ran into, we were able to identify and use peer support through blogs and other internet sources to resolve the problems. There are plenty of sources online which provide tutorials, discuss problems, etc. Example: StackOverflow
Read full review Implementation Rating Just with any programming tasks, have a plan first. Design out the system, spend time to build it correctly the first time and have plenty of testing and user acceptance opportunities. Xamarin was easy to implement for a C# programmer. However, you need to do tutorials to realize the platform's capabilities.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We have not found competitors to Adobe Phone Gap that allows us to be able to code and transfer into alternative languages. The only alternative is to write in the languages required by apple and google in order to launch our apps on their devices and in their app stores. Using Phone Gap removes the learning curve of needing to write in each individual language and therefore would beat the competition because from what we have found and been recommended, there is no alternative to Adobe Phone Gap that is worth pursuing
Read full review Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than
Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom.
Eclipse is a better for generalized software development, provided a developer is comfortable switching between the IDE the command line for certain parts of their workflow, like building, package management, or debugging. But for C# .NET development on MacOS specifically, Xamarin is the best product I've used for the job.
Read full review Return on Investment Time to market is improved with the introduction of Phone Gap. Less dependency on Native programmers to develop mobile applications. Programmers with HTML, Javascript & CSS skills can directly contribute to mobile application development. Read full review Saves development time and deliver fast. Allows inhouse developers build both Android and iOS application without switching languages. Allows use coding in C# in Visual studio IDE from which we can code in different languages. We don't need multiple IDEs installed Read full review ScreenShots